Second Chances
by baileyborough
Summary: A number of different people all learn that death is not the end... A Geist: the Sin-Eaters Fan Fiction.


**Tyson**

In the end, it was the rain that woke him.

He opened his eyes slowly. The left was almost swollen shut. He was lying at the foot of the makeshift metal cross.

_Everything_ hurt.

**Joey**

Darkness. Nothing but darkness. Then-

_"BP is 60/30."_

_"Gimme another bag of O neg, you need to plug this bleed."_

_"For fuck sake- John, can't this thing go any faster?"_

**Lee**_  
_It was quiet here. Dark. Cool.

Almost relaxing.

Almost.

He felt a distant pressure in his chest, but that was someone else's problem.

Wasn't it?

His blood roared in his ears. _Sounds like the ocean_, he thought.

**Zita**  
_Tick, tick, tick..._

She tried opening her eyes, but the light made her wince. Everything was illuminated with that clash of blue and red that told her somewhere back up the cliff was a cop car or three.

Fuck. She needed to get away from here before they caught up.

It was then she realised she was hanging upside down in the car - or whatever was left of it.

**Tyson**

He tried to stand.

He noticed, as if from far away, the gaping holes in his wrists and feet, the ragged tear in his side, the minor cuts and the swollen, multicoloured bruises. They didn't hurt. Not really.

Even though his left wrist was a torn mess, the long spike they drove through it ripping through tendons, ligaments, muscle, he could still move it normally.

"Hunh."

And then he heard it.

It started as a rustling, litter being swept along the ground by the wind. But it coalesced, grew, solidified till Tyson could understand the words being whispered to him from over his left shoulder.

YOU'RE WELCOME.

**Joey**

The paramedic's voices faded, and darkness took him again. But this time, he wasn't alone.

I CAN HELP YOU, said the voice, a sickening rasp that reminded him for all the world of skin scraping along asphalt.

ANOTHER CHANCE.

**Lee**  
He drifted off, lulled to sleep almost, when he heard the muffled, distant voice.

LET ME...

It was barely there, but Lee could feel it. If he concentrated...

LET ME...

Lee tried to speak, but his mouth didn't seem to _want _to open.

LET ME...

Lee thought of the men, the ones with mocking smiles and expensive shoes that took him, and a cold fury blossomed in his chest.

LET ME...

"Yes," said Lee, as his mouth and lungs filled with murky seawater.

**Zita**

She unclicked her seatbelt with hands that were embedded with glass, and fell to the floor - ceiling - of the car. Part of her dreaded seeing how her face must look.

She crawled to one of the blown windows to look up the slope, see where the cops were, when the car radio clicked to life, static filling the car.

RUN NOW. THEY'RE COMING came through faintly. She thought she saw movement in the rear view mirror, but didn't wait to find out.

Zita ran.

**Tyson**  
It looked down on him, standing well over 7 feet as Tyson tried to take it in.

It was a collection of waste and garbage in the shape of a man. It's face - or where it's face should be - was a roiling mass of pictures.

Tyson later figured that each face was a missing persons poster.

He just looked at it, his mind somewhere else, dispassionately taking in this discarded...thing.

"Am I dead?" He muttered, looking at his wounds again.

WERE. WE ARE BACK.

**Joey**

He walked out of the hospital that same night.

Twelve story fall, no broken bones, no concussion.

Miraculous, the doctors had said.

Joey wasn't so sure.

Outside the ER, he saw her, standing in the empty street, looking down toward Main.

A lady, a statue almost, her skin made of asphalt. A thick, red-black oozed from the cracks and fissures that covered her.

He froze when he saw her, the same sick feeling in his stomach that he had felt as a child before people he knew died.

He started to slink away in the opposite direction, when she turned her head painfully to stare at him with eyes that weren't there, and said in a voice that sounded like scabs on pavement:

WELCOME BACK, JOEY. WHERE WILL WE GO NEXT?

**Lee**

The trawler crew that fished him out of the bay took good care of him.

Nobody spoke about what he was doing there; everyone knew what this stretch of water housed deep below, what it _really_ was.  
He thanked them, and they left him to rest. He was actually fine, too, so long as he ignored the man in the corner of his cabin - the bloated, black and blue-skinned mess, his body dripping wet, seaweed-choked chains hanging from most of him.

What Lee couldn't ignore was the wet, bubbly voice in his ear.

LEE it said.

THEY MUST PAY it said.

WE HAVE WORK TO DO it said.

**Zita**  
Her hands shook as she hotwired the sedan. The fourth car this night.

Something was wrong. Hot tears spilled down her cheeks as the car sputtered to life.

Something was _fucked._  
The radio flicked on again, causing a loud sob to escape her.

ZITA. STOP RUNNING. I AM PART OF YOU NOW. YOU CANNOT RUN FROM YOURSELF.

She cried, loud racking sobs as she changed stations.

LOOK IN THE MIRROR interrupted the music.

She kicked the radio viciously and it shut off.

In the rear view mirror, she saw him; the shadowy shape of a man, sitting in the back seat.

She wept harder at the sight.

"What are you?"

The radio clicked on again, and static filled the air.

I AM YOUR PASSENGER, he said.


End file.
